Category Archives: Development

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Days 68 & 69

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Days 68 & 69

After spending most of the day yesterday in meetings, getting home late, then having to run out to attend a band concert, I decided just to wait until today and post both yesterday and today in one article. So here it is!

Tuesday:

IDOT audit of ARRA project

IDOT was scheduled to be in this morning to audit my paperwork for the last ARRA project the city completed in 2010. They, along with the FHWA, have already looked everything over several times and have always been very helpful. They were scheduled to be here at 9 so I had made plans to be out of the office the rest of the day after 11 thinking two hours would be enough time, but they ended up not being able to get here until after 10:30. So I couldn't be here while they were going through everything. And because I am still waiting for the last authorization to be approved, I couldn't really finish all the paperwork, so they will have to come back anyway one more time. I guess at least this way, I can be here next time so in case they can't find the information they need in my records, I can find it for them.

APWA – Detention Pond Design

The rest of the day was spent attending a talk by the APWA about detention areas. Someone from a suburb in the Chicago area shared their experiences with building natural ponds. They said in the early 1990s a lot of mistakes were made in building these facilities, and now there's a lot of maintenance and performance issues. Many have just turned into a huge pile of weeds needing a lot of work. Their community has been systematically renovating the ponds to improve their functions. And she said they are working now to avoid any problems with new ponds that are proposed by developers.

She brought up a lot of interesting and helpful tips about pond design. One included making sure an ecologist checks the seed list. She said they have seed lists submitted that contain weeds and seeds for plants that do not grow well by seed.

APWA – Communications

The other meeting I had was with our chapter communication committee. We were set up at the last executive committee meeting to look into the communications of our chapter. This was our kick-off meeting where we looked at the big picture of what we were trying to accomplish and who we were targeting as an audience. Then we decided what methods and tools we were going to research. I have been creating a workbook for us to use in this effort. So when we are done, I will post a copy of the workbook on the site so anyone else can use it for similar efforts.

Wednesday

Lighting of our Parking Lot

We are still having issues with finding lights that meet the photometric requirements for our parking lot. The last vendor I was working with could not find a light, and like our consultant, did not want to alter our parking lot configuration to make it work. So I contacted one last vendor and asked if he could find a lighting scheme that worked even if it meant changing our parking layout. Hopefully he will be able to come up with something. If not, I don't think we'll be able to meet the lighting requirements for spill over.

Staff meeting

We also had our staff meeting today. Like we do at most, we discussed all our projects. And at the end we tried something new where we held a pre-design project meeting. At this meeting we discussed next year's road project and how we wanted to approach the plan development. We also set some tentative milestones and dates.

Subdivision meeting

Later in the afternoon we met with representatives of a subdivision that is going through a possible change in ownership. The subdivision was never completed, and we are trying to work to get the public improvements done.

Miscellaneous

There were a few other miscellaneous projects I worked on such as helping a resident complete documents to vacate a portion of the city alley. And I am still waiting to get that bid tab from PACE. It has been such a busy week, and tomorrow is also looking like its another full day!

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A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 62

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Day 62

Bus Rapid Transit

Today a few of our staff attended a meeting at Sherman Hospital in Elgin. The county arranged for the meeting to discuss bus rapid transit (BRT) along the Randall road corridor. It was a well attended discussion that lasted for most of the morning. A representative began the presentations by highlighting information about the new hospital. They have a 15-acre geothermal lake for heating/cooling that has saved them $1 million in operating costs annually. (You can read more cool facts about the lake here http://www.shermanhealth.com/geothermal_lake.php)

Next Kane county board chairman Karen McConnaughay summarized the county's work and vision for Randall road. Then Josh Ellis from the Metropolitan Planning Council  shared with us his organization's work with studying bus rapid transit in Chicago. Earlier this year they released the report:  Bus Rapid Transit: Chicago's New Route to Opportunity . His explanation of how they identified potential corridors was interesting and made sense. 

Next up was the consultant who has been studying the implementation of bus rapid transit along Randall road – a long transportation corridor that links many of the larger communities in Kane County. It's interesting to me as someone who just moved back into the area a few years ago to listen to these studies and recommendations, remember what the corridor used to look like 30 years ago, then hear the background story of how Randall road developed. Many, many years ago when I lived and worked for the city of Aurora, I used to occasionally drive along Randall road to visit parks and the fairground. So I remember the rural character of the road that existed before development broke loose out here. Having left the area about 1985, I never saw how the road expanded to a four-lane urban section with major big-box stores replicated along it from Aurora to Elgin. But I've been told there was great effort put into making sure the corridor was streamlined for the movement of cars to the point of designing out pedestrian access. These past efforts seemed to have worked – the road moves a tremendous number of cars on a daily basis. However, it most definitely is not conducive to moving peds/bikes. And unfortunately, all those stores and amenities are huge attractions for the large population living on the other side – particularly teens who can't drive (I know from personal experience with my own children). Over the last few years, attempts have been made to bring the pedestrian back into the mix by adding sidewalks and a bus route with stops. But the pedestrian infrastructure has a long way to go, and that doesn't help with navigating the long distances between shopping centers. So, to summarize, the current trend is to "undo" the "success" of initial, car-centric development efforts in the corridor.

After hearing from the county's consultant, we broke into groups to further discuss the feasibility of implementing BRT in the corridor. Everyone seemed to conclude that yes, it could work, but… I think the "but" shows the success of BRT will be dependent on the market, the understanding and acceptance by the city governments and the public, the funding, and the specific characteristics of each area along the corridor. One key change that will have to occur is for the corridor to change from a sprawling retail center to an area of high density, mixed-use developments. This is because BRTs are dependent on the presence of a large population in need of transit. So the question is, do people want this part of their community to transition to a densely populated area with a mix of other uses in order to improve movement of pedestrians along the corridor? It's hard to say.

Finally, the morning ended with planners from PACE demonstrating the current challenges of navigating the current bus system along Randall road. The problems include a lack of shelters, sidewalks, and navigation aids. Fortunately there are plans to install shelters and sidewalks next year so this will greatly improve the experience.

Overall, readers of my blog can probably figure out what was on my mind the whole time – PRTs! or personal rapid transit. With the cost of BRTs at $2.5 to $24 million per mile, it definitely should be cost effective to instead implement a PRT system, and it would be less intrusive to the corridor. There are other benefits over a BRT such as not having to wait for a bus or learn a schedule and not having to tolerate a packed bus with no where to sit or place bags, and I am not so sure a PRT would require the change to high density. But of course, this is what is so frustrating about being in the US – most people here want to hang onto old technology while other countries are already implementing newer and better solutions that we refuse to even acknowledge. What makes it even more frustrating in this situation is that we were not talking about putting in a BRT system today – this is our county's vision for 2040! By that time, every other country in the world will have a PRT system, and we'll just be cutting the ribbon on a new BRT system. Oh well, I embedded a video showing the new PRT system at Heathrow. Maybe by 2040, I'll be retired and can move to a place like England!

 

Downtown Plan

After lunch we had another meeting to finish reviewing our downtown plan. There are a lot of changes we've made to the draft so the consultant will have a lot of work to revise it. Of course, the focus of our department is more on the transportation sections, but it's still interesting to listen and learn about the zoning and economic development side of it all.

APWA Meeting

At the end of the day I met with a few members of our local chapter of APWA. We have all volunteered to help out at a workshop that APWA will host on November 10th to teach team building and problem solving skills. It was a good and fun discussion, and everyone came up with great ideas to integrate into the day. If you are in the Chicago area and are interested in attending, the link to the information is here: Team Building and Problem Solving Skills

One side discussion that came up at our meeting was the lack of engineers in the US compared to other countries. Although we didn’t get into a lot of theories of why this is, I have to wonder if it does have something to do with what I mentioned in the BRT paragraphs above – the US is behind other countries in investigating and implementing new technology. I realize this is not in every industry, and from what I can tell, our military is impressively cutting edge. But these pockets of innovation don’t get transferred to the lives of the general public.

One suggestion I had made at the BRT meeting was to take the discussion into the schools – after all if they are talking about something for the year 2040, it’s the people in school now who may well be weighing in on the fate of Randall road. Better to have them aware of it and thinking about it now. And maybe it might get some interested in pursuing a career in transportation. But few seem interested in doing this or in seeing the benefits of involving schools in what we do. So we end up with kids in school who see adults implementing the same old solutions, avoiding innovation, and leaving them out of the discussion. Why in the world would they be interested in engineering! However, I realize there’s also the chance that places like China have more engineers because they are making kids study engineering. My co-worker is from there, and she said she had no choice what to study or where to work – that was all decided for her by the government.

On a lighter note, I did discover one of the other volunteers also plays World of Warcraft which also started a whole other side conversation!

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A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 53

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Day 53

Checking Construction

We started out our Monday by visiting a couple jobsites to make sure everything was going as planned. First we stopped by a development where they had placed curb last week along the edges of a driveway. The problem was that the sidewalk was supposed to carry through the drive, and they neglected to break the curb for the sidewalk. So they had to cut out the area where the sidewalk would cross the curb and form and pour the sidewalk. We wanted to check the slopes before they poured today to make sure they met the ADA requirements. Fortunately everything was ok. Then we went to our alley project to correct a mistake the contractor had made last Friday. He had unfortunately marked quite a few driveways as going back in as asphalt. Well, you can imagine how worried the residents were over the weekend – they had been told they were getting concrete driveways and instead saw them marked for asphalt. So when the project engineer got in today he had many calls and emails asking about this. We went out right away to get rid of the asphalt mark and instead mark them as concrete.

Preconstruction Meeting for Culvert Project

Later in the morning we held a preconstruction meeting for our culvert lining project. There really wasn't anything too different about the meeting. We normally cover all the city's rules so the contractor understands he can only work between certain hours, his workers need to clean up after themselves, they need to wear shirts, etc. They expect to start as soon as the liner is delivered.

Signal Invoices

Although we have many traffic signals in the city, we don't maintain any of them ourselves. Instead we pay other agencies for the portion for which we are responsible. So when we get these invoices, we check them and then pay them. This quarter, I found some minor mistake on the invoice so the agency had sent us a new invoice. And today I turned them over to the superintendent who pays them out of his account.

Flower Bed in Geneva

GIS Maps

We finalized two maps today – one is a map showing all the planting areas and what volunteer group takes care of a certain area. We have almost 50 areas throughout the downtown. The other map is an aerial of the whole city. We are trying to print out a new one every year to hang in our conference rooms. We also place a strip along the bottom that lists city statistics such as miles of road, number of hydrants, population, etc.

Council Meeting

I did end up attending the council meeting tonight just to make sure there were no questions about the bids for our culvert project. Nothing was asked so the council ended up approving it. Now we can arrange to have the contracts signed, and the contractor can start when the liner is delivered.

 

 

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A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 52

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Day 52

Although I worked in the office for a few hours today mainly on correspondence and checking with our inspector and engineers to find out the status of some projects, most of my day was spent at our APWA Public Works Camp. This event is our second unconference session that we've hosted, and both have been a great success! Next year another branch is going to host one, and there's been some discussions of expanding it out. We had about 24 people attend and offer some great information and knowledge about many different aspects of public works. I tried to capture the highlights of the discussion using the Cover It Live tool. So if you want to read over the log, pop on over to the Public Works Camp Site!

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A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 51

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Day 51

Could you tell it was a full moon this week? Because it was so obvious in our office! This has been a phenomena I would have never believed in had I never worked for a city. Every time you start to realize things are just a little over the top than normal, you only have to look at the lunar calendar to see why. I know it sounds crazy, but just ask any police officer. And my experience has been the engineering department is not usually spared dealing with the effects either.

Sidewalks need to be constructed through driveways

ADA DSCN3840

(Note: the photo at the left is not taken in our city and is only used to illustrate the subject matter.)

So today started with me questioning some work that was done yesterday at one of the developments currently under construction in our city. Last night I had driven by, and it's almost uncanny how after you work so long in this field, you can barely see something in the dark (or at least only lit by a full moon!) and know it is wrong. Of course, being an engineer, I hate to just trust my instincts totally so I always start out by fully researching the background. The situation involved the placement of sidewalk across a commercial driveway. Because of our requirements and because of ADA compliance, we require sidewalks to continue through driveways, and they must of course meet all the requirements of ADA and now PROWAG. This had been conveyed during the review. And yesterday I had verified with our inspector that he had told them the sidewalk needed to be carried across the drive.

Today I again spoke with our inspector to again verify he had reminded the contractor of this requirement, and he confirmed that yes, he had. Then a few minutes later he gave me and the review engineer a copy of a chain of emails where the contractor asked the developer's engineer, instead of asking the city, how to construct the sidewalk, driveway, and curb flanking the drive through the right of way. The developer's engineer had told the contractor not to carry the drive through so we took this as indication they were not planning to build it according to the plan we had.

We went to the site to check out the work I had seen last night and found that the curb flanking the proposed driveway had been poured, but the area where the sidewalk was to cross was not gapped, nor was the curb at that location at the required 2% slope – it was more like 5%. It also looked as if the curb was not even set at the elevations indicated on the plans. But our concern was the ADA compliance and the sidewalk. So the review engineer called the developer's engineer and later the contractor to indicate they would need to correct what was done to meet the necessary requirements. After a day of going back and forth discussing it, they concluded with an email indicating they would remove a section of curb on both sides so they could construct the sidewalk according to plan and meet the ADA requirements. 

Although we had some other issues flying around through the day, I think that one is representative enough as an example of what we sometimes deal with as developments are built. We have another one scheduled for construction in the near future so I am going to make sure I, along with the inspector, are there when they form it all up so we can be sure it is going in according to plan.

APWA Executive Committee Meeting

Today I was also invited to the Chicago Metro APWA executive committee meeting to talk about our chapter's possible use of social media. I had done something similar with National in early 2009 and also with our State chapter probably also in 2009. So I went anticipating a similar experience and brought similar materials and information. So unfortunately I went thinking I was sharing information about social media and how to best consider its use, but did not know they had already gone through this, and it appears decided they did not want to pursue it. So I think they believed I was there to defend its use rather than assist in understanding what it is and how to use it if they would choose to do so.

Oh well, one of the positives was that I did get to sit next to John Heinz (who told me I could share that on my blog – Hi John!) and I learned that the next time I am invited to assist an organization with social media, it might help to ask a few questions first about what they have done to date. If I had I might have found out about the previous discussions and that some were not exactly sold on the idea. The final positive outcome is that the president is very innovative and open minded and set up a committee to look into it more. And I get to be on that committee with some really cool people – yay! (And I'll be blaming this unexpected experience on the full moon too!)

Update to the above – just realized it's also very beneficial to understand just who exactly is in your audience!

 

 

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A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 50

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Day 50

Geneva Photos

Today was Wednesday so we had our engineering division staff meeting. Like our last staff meeting, it seemed there was quite a bit to discuss. Everyone shared the status of their projects and other tasks they have been working on. We have been on schedule with everything except for a few projects that have been delayed because agreements have not yet been reached with some property owners.

One of our projects that consists of adding a third deck to our existing commuter parking garage has been delayed because the RTA has been reviewing it for about 3 months now. We haven't heard anything, nor do we know why it is taking so long. Metra already performed their review, and we received their comments within a few weeks. So now we cannot start building before winter and will have to wait to bid it out. This means construction won't begin until next Spring. I guess that's $3.5 million dollars worth of work that is on the shelf instead of creating jobs and stimulating our economy! (Our garage is shown in the back and to the right in this photo.)

Failed storm sewer pipe

We took a field visit to a job site where our water department has been working on a "sinkhole." Usually these holes show up in pavement or yards because of some failure in the sewer system. In this case, it appears the concrete storm sewer pipe had settled allowing a pipe joint to open up on the bottom. So when water flowed through, sand from the area around the pipe would be lost. Our crew dug up the area, sealed the joint,and backfilled the hole. I wish I had taken a photo, but had not brought my camera.

Racoons don't fit in sewers!

IMG_4908

We've already had problems with racoons in one sewer in town where two had become wedged and died. We finally discovered them when we received reports of the pipe not flowing properly. Well, today our water foreman was on scene with the crew to rescue a racoon who had wedged himself between the openings of an inlet curb frame. He managed to pull out the racoon, but the animal, being scared, tried to run right back in and wedged himself even worse. So the foreman tried again to pull him out by his tail. The crew videotaped it  - I wish I could have gotten a copy to show here! The second time he pulled him out, he pulled him far enough back so when he released him the racooon ran off under the truck. Wow! Not sure I would have tried to pull a racoon out of a sewer! (The photo, by Andrew Ratto, is not of the racoon we rescued, but illustrates that racoons love to hang out in sewers!)

Development Issues

I am still messing around with that review of a development where we discovered the water main had to be lowered. Today I had to send out an email asking for the engineer to document the changes he will be making. Later in the day, staff had some email discussions about other concept developments in the community so I participated in those.

Performance review and Goals and Objectives

Today, I also had my mid-year performance review. And I still need to hold the reviews for the rest of my staff. I also revised my goals and objectives 2nd quarter report and resubmitted it because the city administrator asked for all of us to submit them in a standard format.

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